An expletive-filled summary of @DanSinker's "Journalism in the open" series

If you haven’t been following Dan Sinker’s posts on “Journalism in the open”, you really should. In fact, I think they’re so important for you to read that I’m going to summarize them here:

(And I was only kidding about the expletives. I can’t believe you fell for that!)

1. An intro: You get what you give – open-source journalism has to be about more than just producing code in the contact of news, it should also be about community.

2. Hard-Coding Community: Continuing with the community theme, Dan points out that there are healthy journalism communities, and some nascent programmer-journalist communities, but – largely – news organizations are still working on their code alone.

3. Are our systems for learning making the grade?: The speed of change in the academy isn’t meeting the speed of innovation on the Web. Journalism education needs to be improved, from high schools to universities and beyond. (With some commentary by Matt Waite, Derek Willis, Micheal Cory, and Greg Linch.)

4. Making a New Reality: Building on Jonthan Stray’s post “Journalism for Makers”, Dan proposes that “making” is working, but that it needs to be taken further. Specifically, he points out the need for something between one-off “hack days” and one-year fellowships.

5. The 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla Fellows: Announcing the first cohort of Knight-Mozilla fellows – Mark Boas, Cole Gillespe, Laurian Gridinoc, Nicola Hughes, and Dan Schultz. Having had the opportunity to watch these five people work towards these fellowships for the last six months, I could not be more proud. Congrats & well deserved!

Dan slipped-in a “thanks!!!” for the early work I did getting the Knight-Mozilla partnership off the ground in 2010. I’ll return the favour and say back to Dan: Starting a project is the easy part. Making it successful is hard. So, a very big thanks to you Dan for taking the wheel and driving the car in such awesome directions. :)

With the fellows announced and preparing to head to their respective newsrooms, I’m looking forward to exploring where we can take this next year.

Have ideas? Hop on the community-mojo mailing list and send us a note.